The Business of the World

There was a time when people believed that the Earth was flat. It was also God’s masterpiece at the centre of a well ordered creation. And humankind was at the pinnacle of the created order. Fearful of looking outward and into the abyss, we fixed our eyes heavenward. Yet, despite this circumscribed, hierarchal worldview, we made progress. We built civilisations, cities and empires. We produced great art and inventions. This was the world in which we did business, a world with imagined but absolute boundaries.

Then the more inquisitive and observant among us, with the aid of simple technology, a crude telescope, discovered that we were wrong. The Earth was in fact round and in orbit around the sun. We learnt that we were part of a greater system. This new knowledge was not immediately well received but we eventually came round to accepting that this was the way things were. No longer fearing that 'there be dragons’ awaiting us at the end of the Earth; we ventured out on voyages of circumnavigation and great discovery. And so began a time of unbridled inventiveness and continous progress.

We expanded our empires, claiming distant lands and their inhabitants, returning with exotic wealth upon which we developed and grew our civilisations. We grew in our number. We built machines and factories and harnessed our mass labour too swiftly benefit our ever-growing consumption. Growth and development became the great spurs of nations, each seeking to outdo the other in wealth and strength.

We figured out the laws of nature that stop us from falling off the planet. We took to the sky and placed a man on the moon and a robot on Mars. In a fraction of the time it had taken us to get from flat Earth to deep space, our technological knowledge exploded in a big bang of ever-expanding inventiveness.

Our businesses flourished. We expanded them from our towns to our cities, from our cities to our lands and from our lands to the lands of others. The world of business became global, interlinked by corporate exchange, finance and the provision of goods and services across international boundaries.

Our expanding scientific knowledge gave us power to create new technologies. We became super-efficient, able to exploit the seemingly boundless resources of Nature. We split the atom, mapped everything — from the outer boundaries of the known universe to the inner world of our genetic make-up.

Not satisfied with having pushed the boundaries of the real world, we created a virtual world where almost everything is possible. We shrunk a great world into a small village; connected by technology and bound by global economy, the accessing, acquiring and exploitation of knowledge became the currency of exchange.

This is the world of global business, where business provides the fuel driving even greater growth to ensure the sustainability of our progress and development.

Even as we marvel at our genius, there are as in the past, those among us who question the way things are. They tell us that the resources available to us are not limitless. They point to the destructive effects of our ways on the natural order, effects so alarming it almost makes us scornful of their warnings. They point to the empty places which were once forests, to the empty seats at Nature’s once bounteous table where species sat that are no more and never shall be again.

They tell us that the great journey of progress, upon which we embarked when we lost our fear of the Earth’s imaginary edge, has brought us teetering on an all too real edge, a place of imbalance, where our boundless spirit is in conflict with Earth’s boundaries.

It is the place, where, unrestrained by natural fear and brimming with confidence born of success, ‘resource-full' human nature stands confronted by 'resource-spent’ Mother Nature sucked dry to fuel our insatiable quest for growth. In minding the world of business, we have been mindless of our impact on the business of the world. We have pushed Nature to the brink, and flout the Natural Law that binds all of life in a mutually sustaining and interdependent ecology.

And so we have come back to the place which, if not true in the minds of men, is true in heart of Nature — the feared edge.

The weight of our excessive demands and our over self-provision threatens a delicate balance. We arrive as aliens, confronted by a world of our own unmaking. We may no longer move inexorably forward — we must stop, not merely to pause to negotiate a way forward (for that will take us over the edge) but to consider which way to move at all, to learn to adapt to what is and to mitigate what yet may be.

In order to move, we must ourselves be moved. We have to shift the way we think, our actions and our paradigm of how things are and how we fit in.

Negotiation is the language of business. We may negotiate among ourselves, create international protocols and agreements on climate change; we may trade and tax our emissions. But we cannot negotiate with Mother Nature.

Nature’s way of changing, the ‘natural way’, is the process of evolution, a naturally selective process involving adaptation and acceptance of Nature’s Law.

How are we to change? How will we adapt? Will we learn to fit in?

Whichever way we choose, we will need to change the way we do business.

The world of business has to become the business of the world.